ARTICLES OF IBSEN, 1999

Most of the essay-length commentaries on Ibsen from 1999 appeared in two collections, a volume from England on Anglo-Scandinavian cross-currents and a volume from Norway of mainly new discussions, in Danish and Norwegian, of When We Dead Awaken.  There were also seven essay-length items published separately, four in English and three in Norwegian.  I will begin with the volume from England and the other essays in English and then go on to the separately published essays in Norwegian and the volume on When We Dead Awaken.

Anglo-Scandinavian Cross-Currents (1) , featuring the work of scholar-critics from both Scandinavia and Great Britain, deals with various aspects of its subject, but more than half of the volume is devoted to "The Ibsen Phenomenon and the 1890s" and other essays on Ibsen.  Olav Lausand's essay on Edmund Gosse (2) is a good account of how Gosse became Ibsen's first champion in England as he made a name for himself in the field of literary criticism by taking up the neglected topic of Scandinavian literature (for Gosse primarily Dano-Norwegian).  Lausand mentions Gosse's 1907 critical biography and some later occasional pieces on Ibsen, but his primary focus is Gosse's essays on Ibsen from 1873-1890.  Lausand provides an account of Gosse's critical methodology, such as it was, and explores the extent to which Gosse was seriously engaged by Ibsen's work as opposed to merely exploiting it for his own benefit.

Sara Jan's essay on the first production of Ghosts (3), "possibly the most famous and significant event of Ibsen's introduction to the English stage," has three main sections.  The first demonstrates the production's great impact by discussing not only the excessive outrage of the English reviewers but also the many imitations, parodies, and other signs of fascination that followed in the production's wake.  This section also contains an interesting and useful approach to the reviewers' outrage, which she does not ridicule, as many others have done, but seeks to explain by showing how closely Ghosts corresponds to a phenomenon that had already disturbed the English—namely, the naturalistic literary mode developed by Zola and his followers—and, more importantly, by delineating many of Ghosts' genuinely disturbing features.  The second section consists of a Bakhtinian reading of the play, in which Ibsen's famous "absence" from his text is seen as creating "a radical relativization of voices" that is "achieved blatantly in the destruction of the discourse of the pseudo-raissoneur Manders, and subtly by the undermining of the most promising voices, those of the Alving mother and son."  The third section returns to the play's connection with naturalism to claim that its impact with those who supported it arose from it's ultimately transcending "naturalism's dominant ideological tendencies": "Though Ghosts illustrates a corruption of the flesh, it transcends naturalism by identifying repression rather than desire, ideology rather than appetite, as the cause of tragedy."  The Bakhtinian reading is well worth consulting, but I would like to have seen it more fully developed.  The claim that Ghosts transcends naturalism also cries out for further development; it is stated rather than argued—perhaps because the play does not unequivocally support it.

Gail Marshall's first essay in the volume (4) discusses the impact of the advent of Ibsen on English actresses.  In "the early- and mid-1880s," Marshall notes, the "leading lady of the English stage [. . .] was typically conceived of, by theatre audiences and readers of conservative, middle-class periodicals, as charming and beautiful, an ornament to both stage and society."  She was "constructed" in "the role of an icon of respectability" and "scarcely needed to concern herself with the nature of the dramatic character she was playing."  Indeed, she scarcely needed to concern herself with acting, for her function was rather to attract audiences and additionally serve commerce in such other ways as "advertising new fashions" on the stage.  The "subject-matter of Ibsen's plays and the nature of their heroines" was one of "three mutually-supporting elements" that made possible a "change in the actress's conditions," the other two being "the increasingly importunate call for a 'literary drama'" in the wake of Ibsen's advent and "the new economic structure of the subsidized theatre companies."  Not surprisingly, the reviewers vigorously endeavored to prevent the resulting transformation in the actress' function.  Marshall provides some concrete illustrative details, but her essay has little to offer beyond what I have conveyed in my summary of it.  Perhaps a reader would be better served by her 1998 Cambridge book, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth.

In "'Too Far from Piccadilly'" (5), Kirsten Shepherd-Barr draws a sharp contrast between Ibsen's reception in England and his reception in France "during virtually the same span of years."  Whereas in England "Ibsen met with a wall of resistance, a hostile reaction based overwhelmingly on moral indignation," in France he "was embraced by young avant-garde directors like Antoine and Lugné-Poe."  Shepherd-Barr accounts for the contrast by noting significant differences between conditions in the two countries.  English audiences and theater reviewers were provincially incapable of interesting themselves in characters and subjects remote from Piccadilly, and the drama they did enjoy "was seriously hampered by the institution of the Censor, and by the pervasive Puritanism and double-standard of Victorian society of which the censorship was an obvious symptom."  France, on the other hand, felt a keen interest in foreign literature and drama, especially from Scandinavia, and had already established a strong tradition of alternative theater.  The French avant-garde directors welcomed Ibsen as an ally in their effort to fully modernize French theater, while the proponents of Ibsen in England modeled their productions of his plays "as closely as they could on conventional West End staging techniques" in order to make them seem acceptable.  According to Shepherd-Barr, this aspect of the contrast makes the English productions of Ibsen "arguably more radical than the French," since the "'shock of the new' in Ibsen thus came through primarily in the texts and the ideas inherent in them, rather than the interpretations and embellishments associated with a particular agenda, like that of the French symbolists."  Shepherd-Barr's account reflects the facts, but it seems to me that she ultimately overstates the differences between the two receptions.  Her essay is well researched and her notes contain much information of interest.   Occasionally, however—as for example in her citing A. B. Walkley and William Butler Yeats—she ignores the complexity of some of her evidence in her effort to make it serve her purpose.

Gail Marshall's second essay in the volume (6) focuses on Eleanora Duse's performance in A Doll House during her first London season in May and June 1893 in an attempt "to assess the part" Duse played "in the narrative of Ibsen in the English theatre" in the 1890s.  This is a more substantial contribution than Marshall's first essay.  She considers the reviews of the performance to show how Duse was able to give the play more credibility (with the reviewers, at least) than it had had previously in England.  In part this resulted from Duse's talent and prestige, but an even more important cause was the reviewers' dissatisfaction with aspects of her interpretation.  They were, in effect, "asserting a form of ownership over the piece quite unlike the estranging hostility and self-protecting bewilderment espoused by the play's first audiences."  "Thus," Marshall concludes, "although this particular production may not have been very well-received, it signals a crucial stage in the reception of Ibsen into the English theatre, a challenge by an outsider which enforces cultural possession if not colonization."

Tore Rem provides an amusing and highly informative account of the parodies of Ibsen that almost immediately followed his breakthrough in England (7).  Rem notes that there were many such parodies and briefly considers examples by J. M. Barrie and Robert Buchanan, but his primary focus is the series of parodies that Thomas Austey Guthrie produced for Punch.  Rem demonstrates that these parodies were part of a concerted attack against Ibsen that was also waged in the magazine's reviews of his plays.  Rem analyzes Guthrie's techniques in detail to make clear that the parodies were intended not only to criticize the various aspects of Ibsen's supposed decadent moral stance but also "to undermine the concept that Ibsenian drama is realism, in the sense that it reflects any kind of reality that can be recognized as such by the readers of Punch."  Rem also discusses "many examples of more cleverly executed parodic strategies—of integrating phrases identical or near-identical to the original in a new and ironic context," which "might indicate" that the readers of Punch "had a greater familiarity with the Norwegian dramatist, be it sympathetic or hostile, than most of the magazine's reviewers would have liked to think."  Four of Guthrie's parodies were soon translated into Dano-Norwegian for Ibsen's Scandinavian readers, as Rem points out, and this fact in conjunction with the feeling evoked by reading Guthrie's parodies now makes me wonder to what extent Guthrie's more cleverly executed strategies may have stemmed from a grudging respect on his part that was contrary to his employer's intention.

Sven-Johan Spånberg's essay on Ernest Dowson (8) demonstrates that Dowson was a staunch and highly knowledgeable supporter of Ibsen during his breakthrough in England and argues that Dowson's construction of himself, subsequently perfected and ratified by Arthur Symons and William Butler Yeats, as a fin-de-siècle poet "doomed to self-destruction and early death because his talent consumed him" was in part influenced by "Ibsen's portrayal of the artist in the characters of Oswald Alving and Ejlert Løvborg in Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, both of which were first performed in London in 1891."  There is not much in this essay of obvious interest to those specifically concerned with developing further understanding of Ibsen and his work, but the occasion it provides for thinking of these two characters in connection with a prominent paradigm of the 1890s gives it some importance in this respect.

Bjørn Tysdahl's topic is "Ibsen's Stories in Joyce's Dubliners" (9), but he seems uncomfortable with his topic's basic implications.  He questions the value of thinking in terms of influence and declares his intention of instead examining "some of the sparks that fly when" a list of vague narrative motifs he has attributed to Dubliners and a list of the Ibsen plays that Joyce mentions in his early essays "are moved close together."  The narrative motifs he considers are "journeys and meals," and in discussing instances of them he continues to show his discomfort with his topic by affecting a very casual air and by resisting any impulse to make explicit what sort of heat and light he finds in the flying sparks.  Some aspects of his essay, especially his moving John Gabriel Borkman close together with the final paragraph of Joyce's "The Dead," make me wonder whether the problem may after all not be discomfort but rather the lack of having anything particular to say.  I am not convinced by what he says about either of these texts in bringing them together, but a serious attempt to explain what he had in mind might well have made me think otherwise.

Richard Brown's consideration of Ibsen and Joyce (10) is a much richer piece, though it is ultimately more about Joyce than Ibsen, since he discusses Joyce's interest in Ibsen and examines Joyce's comments on Ibsen in an attempt to determine the exact nature of Ibsen's impact on him.  He concludes that Joyce's interest in Ibsen was not an isolated or accidental aspect of his overall "establishment of a writerly presence in the English literary culture of his times” but "something closely involved in his relationship with the London that was the centre of the literary cosmopolitanism of his time."  Brown finds "relatively little sense of what we might call Ibsen the Norwegian" in Joyce's writings about Ibsen.  He also does not "always [find] a very fully-developed critical discourse about the content or the felt significance of the content of the plays": "It does seem rather as if Ibsen hovers as an intensely powerful inspirational figure for Joyce's thinking at this time, described as being beyond critical description and having a semi-divine symbolic aura which may suggest a number of potential resonances or glosses."  Brown's evaluation of Joyce's interest in Dano-Norwegian literature also includes a consideration of Joyce's reading of Bjørnson's The Fisher Lass and possible traces of this work in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Inga-Stina Ewbank's "main concern" in her consideration of Dickens and Ibsen (11) "is to explore how the narrative fiction of Dickens may have been involved in Ibsen's development of his own mode of drama."  Most of her essay consists of an examination of "three textual echoes, however faint": "the circus in Pillars of Society and Hard Times, the doll's house in the Ibsen play of that title and Our Mutual Friend, and the mountain epiphany in Little Eyolf and David Copperfield."  She finds that these echoes show "Ibsen considering and making use of a Dickensian technique of dramatizing society—and ultimately going his own way." Pillars of Society "is like a dramatized novel, a kind of Bernick and Son," while the "Dickensian echoes" of A Doll's House, written two years later, "measure Ibsen's distance from the novelist," and the far more deeply ironic intertextuality linking David Copperfield and Little Eyolf "measures the distance between Ibsen's desolate dramatic world of the 1890s and a world of human and divine certainties."  This is the core of Ewbank's essay, but as with all of her work on Ibsen the core is continuously enriched by the steady flow of additional observations stemming from a mind's total engagement with its topic.  Most of the additional observations in this case constitute a small but valuable seminar on the kinds of perceptions that can be legitimately made in the areas of influence and intertextuality, but there are also interesting speculations about Ibsen's movement from traditional to modern drama and a fascinating consideration of Ibsen's possibly having been spurred in his thinking about Pillars of Society by a key-word used by Georg Brandes in the preface to his translation of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism.

Those interested in Ibsen may also want to consult two other items in Anglo-Scandinavian Cross-Currents: Anka Ryall's account of Ethel Tweedie's visit with Ibsen as reported in her 1894 travel book, A Winter Jaunt to Norway (12), and Terry Gunnell's appendix, "The Reception of Scandinavian Drama and Other Works by Scandinavian Dramatists in England, 1840-1915: A Chronology of Translations" (13).

The first of the separately published essays, Mary Kay Norseng's "Suicide and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler" (14), is undoubtedly the most important essay on Ibsen from 1999 because it provides a compelling new way of thinking about a major Ibsen text.  Norseng takes issue with a standard interpretation of Hedda's suicide—that it is a symbolic statement simultaneously affirming beauty and defying a repressive society—because for her this interpretation provides too much clarity and certainty ("Ibsen's truth, simply put, is messier than that, for it is a human truth he seeks") and because it derives from a romantic tradition of interpretation.  In her own effort to account for Hedda's suicide, Norseng turns away from literary models of any kind and draws instead on suicide theory as developed by academic experts on the topic and by writers like A. Alvarez and William Styron who described their own suicidal symptoms.  She finds that the basic ideas of this discipline apply to Hedda's situation as it is presented in the play, especially the concept of the potential suicide's psychological pain (or "psychache," as one of the academics calls it) and the fundamental idea that "People who die by suicide do not want to die.  They simply want to end the pain. If there were other means to do so than suicide, they would seek them."  This is in effect an initial diagnosis that Norseng goes on to confirm in a number of interesting ways that include demonstrating Ibsen's fascination with suicide, examining the circumstances of various real-life models that commentators have proposed as inspirations for Ibsen's creation of Hedda—the best discussion of Ibsen's supposed models that I have read—and carefully tracing Hedda's "vocabulary of pain" as it is recorded in the play.  This is a long, powerful essay that should be read by anyone interested in Hedda Gabler.  When I first read it in 1999 I thought of it as being excellent in spite of its going against a cardinal teaching about the study of literary texts (back in the day when graduate programs still tried to teach something about the study of literary texts): that a literary character should not be analyzed as if it were a real human being.  Re-reading the essay now I am inclined to think that its most valuable aspect may well be its enlarging the available means by which we seek to more fully understand and appreciate a text.

Stephen S. Stanton's very long essay about Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and Little Eyolf (15) seeks to argue a sound and important idea, that Ibsen, in his late plays, used Scandinavian folklore (here flattened out into "trolls") to make possible the exploration of aspects of human psychology for which an appropriate language had not yet been developed.  The essay contains some interesting details about the development of modern psychology that Stanton has gleaned from the work of those who have researched the matter, but on the whole the essay has so many problematic features that it can scarcely be regarded as useful.  Stanton's conception of "trolls" is so broad and vague that it can include everything and nothing and his application of it to the plays sometimes leads to allegorizing them and usually leads to reducing their individual specifics so that they all begin to sound alike.  His claim to find "a progressive pattern of amelioration in the trolls”—i.e., a pattern traced by the plays in which more and more the trolls within can be subdued and conquered—is not convincingly demonstrated.  His writing, as the previous quotation illustrates, is often less than felicitous.  The discussions of individual plays, which make up most of the essay, consist largely of crude and approximate summaries and the rehashing of interpretations by other commentators, interpretations that are seldom of particular relevance to the essay's ostensible subject.  Stanton's own voice focusing directly on a play or some aspect of it is seldom heard, and on the rare occasions when something of that sort is heard the impression created is not one inspiring confidence.

John Stanton-Ife's interesting essay on The Master Builder (16) focuses on Solness' "deliberations about the fire" that made possible his success as a builder "and about luck and blame," which Stanton-Ife finds to be "a fit object of study in the young field of law and literature" because these deliberations involve a tension between blame and luck "that also lies at the heart of the law."  Stanton-Ife looks at the deliberations from the point of view of the law, which recognizes three kinds of luck that might complicate the notion of responsibility: "constitutive luck," which pertains to the sort of person the agent of an action is, "circumstantial luck," which pertains to "the kind of problem and situation [the agent] faces," and "outcome luck," which pertains to the results of the agent's action, foreseen and unforeseen.  In the heart of the essay, Stanton-Ife then examines the extent to which Ibsen argues in the play for the extreme version of "constitutive luck," the "Owenite" idea that it is unjust to blame anyone for what he cannot help and therefore that it is unjust to blame at all, since people do not construct their own natures.  Stanton-Ife finds a good deal of evidence for this view, especially in Solness' being powerless to prevent "his helpers and servants" from carrying out his wishes, but he ultimately concludes that Solness "does have the power to summon, and it is for the summoning of the helpers and servants that he must take responsibility."

Birgitta Steene's essay on making film versions of The Wild Duck (17) begins by considering essential differences between the stage and screen as distinct media.  The Wild Duck constitutes an extreme version of the creation of theatrical space in building "its dramatic strength [. . .] on physical confinement, invisible yet dramatically important space, and literary (dialogue) symbolism," while "the film medium builds its impact on an ability to make everything visible, to bring us up close both to the depicted characters and to their referential space."  The filmmaker must decide whether or not to bring the camera into the loft, and will most likely choose to do so, since the alternative would probably result in a photographed play, but bringing the camera into the loft does away with the play's "juxtaposition of real space and metaphysical space" and its presentation of the title figure as "at one and the same time a dear household pet and a symbolic icon."  In the slightly longer second half of the essay, Steene turns to the evolving history of adaptation theory and argues that we should look upon the film version of a play not as an attempt to reproduce it but as the occasion for a particular reading of it.  She then provides a detailed account of the male-focused reading of The Wild Duck in Hans Wilhelm Geissendörfer's film Die Wiltente from 1976 and concludes, "what is interesting about Geissendörfer's adaptation is the fact that in being an intelligent and cohesive, yet slanted, rendition of the Ekdal tragedy, it sends us back to Ibsen's text with renewed ambitions to retrieve its female vision."

Siri Erika Gullestad's reading of The Master Builder from a psychoanalytic perspective (18, in Norwegian) does not start promisingly, since she directs it at an idea that one would have hoped had disappeared from view decades ago, the idea that Ibsen's last plays concern a conflict between art and life in which the aspiring artist necessarily pays for his dedication to his art by sacrificing his and others' happiness in a betrayal of love.  But what Gullestad herself has to say is very much worth reading.  She dismisses this idea about the plays by arguing that there is no substantiation in psychoanalytic thought for the notion that greatness has a price and that a betrayal of love should be seen as the product of some incapacity to love.  More important, Gullestad goes on to seek in psychoanalytic theory alternative explanations for Solness' guilt feelings and other aspects of his behavior.  She finds in his scenario about the burning of the house "an aggressive fantasy directed against Aline."  She also discusses Solness' "magical thinking" and the anxiety that accompanies such thinking, his need to communicate with someone who can fully understand him, and his fear of falling, which he perceives as retribution.  Gullestad applies her psychoanalytic perspective intelligently and responsibly and consistently grounds her discussions in specific textual evidence.

Ole M. Høystad's "That Old Virgin" (19, in Norwegian) touches on Spengler's discussion of Ibsen as an important representative of the decline of the West, but the essay is mainly about Nietzsche's three very brief published criticisms of Ibsen.  Høystad's purpose is to explain what Nietzsche meant by interpreting them in relation to their contexts and then pointing to the characteristics of Ibsen's work that Nietzsche must have been referring to.  Høystad finds that what Nietzsche objected to in Ibsen was his idealism, his moralizing, his resemblance to the Utilitarianians, whom Nietzsche despised, and his lack of a Dionysian spirit—for, according to Høystad, however much Ibsen may have thematized Dionysus he was never Dionysian in form.  There are two basic problems with these claims.  The minor one is that Høystad never considers the almost certain likelihood that Nietzsche knew little or nothing about Ibsen at first hand and that the criticisms can therefore scarcely be regarded as considered formulations.  The major one is that Høystad's Ibsen is a caricature derived from the passages in Nietzsche and from a few commentators on Ibsen who demonstrate very limited understanding of their subject.  The only Ibsen commentator Høystad quotes who shows any awareness of the deep affinity between Ibsen and Nietzsche is Theoharis C. Theoharis, whom Høystad abruptly dismisses by saying that Theoharis is looking at things from Ibsen's perspective while he himself looks at them from Nietzsche's.  Høystad occasionally cites things about Ibsen that should have prompted him to start rethinking his caricature, but he is able to readily dismiss these things as well.

Helje Kriglebotn Sødal (20, in Norwegian) provides a sketch of the commentary on Brand to show that those concerned with Kierkegaard's influence on the play have primarily focused on Kierkegaard's Either/Or and paid little attention to Fear and Trembling.  He then develops in detail the importance of Fear and Trembling for Brand, especially in relation to Ibsen's use of the biblical narrative of Abraham and Isaac and to Brand's belief that in his treatment of his child and his wife he properly ignores the dictates of ethics in order to fulfill the higher purpose of serving God.  Sødal carefully works out the ways Ibsen's treatment of these matters differs from Kierkegaard's and surveys a number of ways of interpreting the differences.  But his main point is that our knowledge of Ibsen's using the Kierkegaardian material in connection with Brand should prompt us to resist a tendency to condemn Brand in favor of a more nuanced reading of him.

The anthology on When We Dead Awaken (21) contains several reactions to the play by creative writers (including excerpts from Rilke and Mann and Joyce's review of the play in English), a 46-item bibliography, and nine substantial critical discussions, one in Danish and the rest in Norwegian.  Two of the latter derive from the book by Lisbeth Waerp that I review elsewhere in this issue, and so I won't discuss them here.  The principal focus of Fritz Paul's essay (22) is the sceneography of John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken and the way in which it departs sharply from that of the first ten dramas of contemporary life: in these last two plays the characters no longer merely yearn for the outside world within the confines of the restricting parlor but actually leave the parlor to act in the outer world of nature.  Paul discusses this change in scenography in a number of perspectives, including Wagner's later operas, film technique, and, principally, the theme of art versus life that has for so long been associated with Ibsen's later plays.  Perhaps the most interesting part of Paul's essay is the final paragraph, in which he refers to "the negative theology of the anti-transcendentalist Ibsen" and views When We Dead Awaken as "not only a saying farewell to the nineteenth century but also a pessimistic prophecy about the twentieth."

Vigdis Ystad's initial focus (23) is Rubek's sculpture, "Resurrection Day," which she discusses in a number of contexts, the most important of which is its recreation in the scenography of the play, especially in the final episode.  This section of the essay touches on several topics and even includes a sketch of some of the main interpretations of the play, but the final two-thirds of the essay is much more focused and more useful as an aid to understanding and appreciation.  Here Ystad introduces a new take on the art versus life conflict in the play, proposing that art and life can be viewed as "dissimilar facets of a double, paradoxical, and indissoluble relationship," in which "life, as it is given form and meaning by human beings, can be seen as a form of art and art can be understood as a means of mastering existence by giving it form and meaning."  She develops this proposal with an interesting account of how the play evokes art through its stylization of numerous aspects of its content and ultimately becomes a commentary on art.

Heinrich Detering, in a revision of an essay he published in 1989 (24), takes his cue from the comments on When We Dead Awaken by Joyce, Rilke, and Mann, especially their viewing the work, in Detering's wording, as "an extraordinary and violent combining of the visually concrete with entirely invisible abstract themes and interrelationships" which leads to "the drama's ultimately nullifying itself, indeed, creating its own utter negation."  For Detering, the union between the seen and the unseen and the concrete and the abstract that Joyce, Rilke, and Mann emphasize amounts to allegory, and he traces how the play gradually becomes more and more explicitly allegorical.  The substance of the allegory is the opposition between Maja and Ulfheim on the one hand and Rubek and Irene on the other, who represent "the two extreme forms of the fin de siècle's post-Christian redemptive religion—the world views that seek to restore a lost metaphysical meaning and the guidance for living that follows from them."  The self-nullification to which the drama leads is the failure of either world view to sustain itself and is specifically represented in the destruction of Rubek and Irene in the avalanche.  Detering's detailed exposition of his reading is well worth consulting.

The other four essays I discuss from this volume all deal with the sexual politics of When We Dead Awaken.  Frode Helland's consideration of whether Irene should be considered as an "object" or a "subject" derives from his doctoral dissertation on Ibsen's final plays (25).  Noting that most accounts of Irene in the commentary on the play compound Rubek's objectifying of her by using Rubek's point of view to define her, Helland pursues the more difficult task of trying to view her in her own terms.  He concludes that while Rubek succeeded in making her "an object for his gaze" Irene nonetheless maintained her subjectivity by holding back from him the knowledge of her plan to kill him if he ever sought to possess her sexually and that she further manifests her subjectivity in the present-time action of the play by displaying more insight than Rubek about both him and herself.  Since Helland is an excellent close reader his development of the argument about Irene is loaded with additional illuminating observations about the play.

Sofie Gram Ottesen's essay (26, in Danish) is unworthy of inclusion in this otherwise quite satisfactory volume.  Ottesen approaches her ostensible topic, the female characters' managing to find a voice, through the concept of melodrama and especially the take on it in Stanley Cavell's book about Hollywood films of the 30s and 40s.  This is somewhat useful in regard to the play's highly melodramatic presentation of Irene, but for the most part Ottesen lacks a coherent idea of melodrama and has difficulty establishing a comfortable fit between Cavell's formulations and Ibsen's text.  The real problem with the essay emerges, however, when Ottesen begins to discuss Ibsen's text without mediation and reveals that she has virtually no understanding of it.  In her hands Dr. Ibsen turns into Dr. Phil, for she consistently trivializes the issues of the play into talk-show-style self-help advice.  Rubek's echoing the devil in his promise to Irene and Maja "is a sign that he is not the hero of the piece."  The problem between him and Irene stems from his not trying to really get to know her by having sex with her.  When they finally get around to having sex toward the end of the play, they can't content themselves with a nice roll in the hay like ordinary people ("kan de simpelthen ikke få sig selv til på almindelig vis at knække anemoner med nakken på en dejlig grøn eng") but have to "put themselves on display for all the powers of light and darkness."  Ibsen includes the uniting of Maja and Ulfhejm in order to show us the right way to be romantically involved.  Irene's calling Rubek "en digter" (a writer or poet) rather than an artist is Ibsen's way of telling us that the right kind of art is the kind Rubek practiced after he started fiddling with the original version of "Resurrection Day."  And so on.

Per Bruvik's "Art, Sex, and Woman" (27) resembles the preceding piece to some extent because it spends a good deal of time on Rubek's fear of sex (as if this were the only thing to be said about him and sexual politics were Ibsen's only concern in When We Dead Awaken) and especially because of Bruvik's discussing Rubek's former treatment of Irene as somehow equivalent to child molestation.  The essay is considerably redeemed, however, by its first and last sections.  In the first Bruvik tries to downplay the importance of the art versus life theme by emphasizing the centrality of the extreme difficulty of male-female relationships, not only in When We Dead Awaken but also, as Bruvik tries to show by discussing Love's Comedy, in most of Ibsen's work.  The last section of the essay is a richly detailed account of the great extent to which When We Dead Awaken qualifies as a fin-de-siècle text based on what it has in common with other central texts of the period.  Here, too, Bruvik sums up what he takes to be a fundamental Ibsenian truth formulated in various ways throughout his works: "Happiness, defined as a happy relationship between a man and a woman, can only be based on illusions that always fail for the artist, the intellectual, and the person of feeling."

For Beret Wicklund (28) the action of When We Dead Awaken comprises "Rubek's settling of accounts with the two women in his life," so that "the text centrally focuses on the relationship between the sexes, and the attitudes and the points of view of the women acquire considerable importance."  For this reason Wicklund finds it appropriate to read the text from a feminist perspective, which leads her to conclude that "the play shows how the goals and desires of women are sacrificed in favor of male self-assertion and how the role of the artist projects itself as an expression of the ideology that gives such 'egoism' social legitimacy.  Seen thus this powerful symbolic drama is also both social criticism and a feminist text."  Wicklund backs up her conclusions with a careful and responsible detailed reading of the text, one that consists for the most part of observations that an alert reader would probably expect from an intelligent application of her perspective to the material she is examining.  Toward the end of the essay, however, Wicklund has some surprises.  One is her consideration of Irene's shadow, the nun, as a representation of dark dimensions in Irene, dimensions that pertain to Irene's passive collusion in Rubek's scopophilia as she modeled for him.  The other surprise involves the final attainment of harmony between Irene and Rubek, which Wicklund finds to be interestingly ambiguous because the two are in various ways reinstating the unsatisfactory sexuality that characterized their original relationship.

 

1.  Anglo-Scandinavian Cross-Currents, edited by Inga-Stina Ewbank, Olav Lausund, and Bjørn Tysdahl (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1999).

2.  Olav Lausund, "Edmund Gosse: Ibsen's First Prophet to English Readers," in item 1, 139-58.

3.  Sara Jan, "Naturalism in the Theatre: Ibsen's Ghosts in 1890s England," in item 1, 159-73.

4.  Gail Marshall, "Ibsen and the Actresses on the English Stage," in item 1, 174-86.

5. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, "'Too Far from Piccadilly': Ibsen in England and France in the 1890s," in item 1, 187-202.

6.  Gail Marshall, "Duse and Ibsen in the 1890s," in item 1, 203-14.

7. Tore Rem, "'Cheerfully dark': Punchian Parodies of Ibsen in the early 1890s," in item 1, 215-30.

8.  Sven Johan Spånberg, "Constructions of the Artist: Dowson, Ibsen, and the Fin de Siècle," in item 1, 231-243.

9.  Bjørn Tysdahl, "Ibsen's Stories in Joyce's Dubliners," in item 1, 265-79.

10.  Richard Brown, "James Joyce between Ibsen and Bjørnson: A Portrait of the Artist and The Fisher Lass," in item 1, 280-96.

11.  Inga-Stina Ewbank, "Dickens, Ibsen and Cross-Currents," in item 1, 297-315.

12.  Item 1, 324-25.

13.  Item 1, 353-56.    

14.  Mary Kay Norseng, "Suicide and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (The Seen and the Unseen, Sight and Site, In the Theater of the Mind)", Scandinavian Studies, 77 (1999) 1-40.

15.  Stephen S. Stanton, "Trolls in Ibsen's Late Plays," Comparative Drama, 32 (1998-99) 541-80.

16.  John Stanton-Ife, "Ibsen and the Ascription of Blame in Law," in Law and Literature, edited by M. Freeman and A. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 199) 149-65.

17.  Birgitta Steene, "Can This Bird Fly?  The Wild Duck on the Screen," Edda, 1999, 31-39.

18.  Siri Erika Gullestad, "Har storheten en pris? Bygmester Solness I psykoanalytisk perspektiv," Nytt Norsk Tidsskrift , 1999, 142-53.

19.  Ole M. Høystad, "Den gamle jomfrua: Nietsches og Spenglers Ibsen-kritikk," in Friedrich Nietzsche: Filosofi og Samfunn, edited by Jan-Olav Henricksen (HøyskoleForlaget AS—Nordic Academic Press, 1999) 69-85.

20.  Helje Kringlebotn Sødal, "Henrik Ibsens Brand—illustrasjon på en teleologisk suspensjon av det etiske?" Edda, 1999, 63-70.

21.  Livet på likstrå: Henrik Ibsens Når vi døde vågner, edited by Lisbeth Waerp (Oslo: Landslaget for norskundervisning (LND) og Cappelen Akademisk Forlag as, 1999).

22.  Fritz Paul, "Mellom opera og film: Scenelandskapene I Ibsens John Gabriel Borkman og Når vi døde vågner," in item 21, 41-58.

23.  Vigdis Ystad, "Livet som kunstverk: Henrik Ibsens Når vi døde vågner," in item 21, 59-78.

24. Heinrich Detering, "'Pax vobiscum': Allegorisering og metafysikk I Ibsens Når vi døde vågner," in item 21, 79-92.

25.  Frode Helland, "Irene: objekt eller subjekt," in item 21, 125-148; Helland's doctoral dissertation is Melankoliens spill.  En Studie I Henrik Ibsens siste skuespill, University of Oslo, 1997.

26.  Sofie Gram Ottesen, "Om at finde sin stemme: Melodrama som skepticisme i Ibsens Når vi døde vågner," in item 21, 149-78.

27.  Per Buvik, "Kunsten, kjønnet og kvinnen: Om Ibsens Når vi døde vågner," in item 21, 179-201.

28.  Beret Wicklund, " Kjønnskampens kunst, kunsten som kjønnskamp: En feministisk lesning av Ibsens Når vi døde vågner," in item 21, 202-225.

 

Thomas Van Laan

Emeritus, Rutgers University